by Shawn Grady
That was it then. Elle stood. “You almost had me there, Chief. Madison has a weekly medical appointment in Oakland. We can’t miss those. Best of luck though in finding a pilot.” Elle turned and walked to the door. She set her hand on the knob.
Weathers cleared his throat. “Then fly her there.”
Elle froze. “What?”
“You need to log flight time for training hours anyway, right? In fact . . . there’s a smokejumper crew in Redding, California, that needs a ride up to the Desolation Complex. I could have you fly to the Redding base tomorrow and take Madison with you. You can fuel up there and then make the quick flight down to Oakland for the appointment. When it’s done, you just fly back up to Redding and pick up the jumpers for the trip to South Lake. I can have Carol meet you at the South Lake Tahoe airport with a car. What do you think?”
Elle felt a door swing wide open inside her. She couldn’t find a reason to refuse. She and Maddie would be provided for. How could she say no?
She extended her hand toward Weathers with a smile. “All right, then, Chief. You’ve got yourself a bombardier.”
CHAPTER
07
Elle gripped the smooth wood of the steering wheel. Violet washed the horizon—night retreating and the dawn making its entrance. Was she doing the right thing?
Elle had jammed everything she thought they’d need for a month-plus into her ’76 convertible MG. Madison slept beside her in her booster car seat, gently snoring with her head back and mouth open. The house looked dark and abandoned, silhouetted by the lone streetlight on the country road. Cecelia was gone. A note on the table had explained she was going to Florida—Miami first—to restart her life and forget the West. To find herself. . . .
Elle couldn’t help but think that she’d do nothing but the opposite.
Elle opened the glove box and pulled three CD cases from it. Her favorite groups—Phoenix, Arcade Fire, The Ashes.
There was a pattern there.
She slid the Arcade Fire disc into her player, dialing it in to song seven—“Wake Up.”
She dropped the MG into gear and headed for the airfield.
Wind whistled through small gaps in the soft-top. Maddie stirred and yawned with a squeak. She stretched. “Put it on number nine, Mommy.”
Elle smiled. She played the disc enough that Maddie had already developed favorites. Pastures and fences flipped by, bowing power lines and telephone cables and lonely shadowed street signs, and Elle had the sensation that she and Madison were actually sitting still and it was the earth moving and rolling beneath them—turning and shifting—and all she had to do was play pretend and turn the wheel slightly left and right, the way actors did in the old movies. Soon they’d touch down in a place she hadn’t been to since her father’s disappearance.
Elle lifted her insulated mug and sipped English breakfast tea. Herbal dregs mixed with honey. The stretch of cool stratus steel along the horizon lifted, pushed up by a narrow band of molten sunlight.
The car still smelled like her father. A hint of Brut aftershave, not overpowering or odious. She breathed deep.
Thinking about it now, she marveled at how he, her dad, finished raising her on his own. Granted, she had already been fourteen when her mom died of cancer. And she’d pretty much grown up at the McCall Smokejumper Base. She’d had free rein, really, about that little part of Idaho, surrounded by forest and Payette Lake. That little section of the state had been the planet to her. It was all she’d known. So much freedom—swimming in Payette by herself and hiking off and wandering to places she’d never consider letting Maddie, even as a grown-up, go alone.
She loved to fly like her dad, but short of a vague sense that piloting airplanes would somehow fit into her future, she really wasn’t sure of what the days ahead would hold. But one thing she knew for sure by the time she’d turned nineteen—and that summer with Silas Kent confirmed it—she never wanted to marry a smokejumper.
Strange, now that she thought about it, that a girl raised with so much independence would “settle down” so early. She’d thought she was making the prudent choice in marrying Seth Riordan the winter after Silas left. The decision had felt stable, secure. He offered the chance at a family a bit more as it was “supposed to be”—in a house in a suburb, nowhere near a runway, and void of men who launched themselves out of aircraft for a living.
Seth had a business degree and a reliable schedule. Promoted to middle manager of sales at an insurance office, he’d left for work at seven thirty, taken his half-hour lunch break at twelve thirty, and was off at four thirty. She never questioned his monthly “sales” trips that took him away for a week at a time. It was part of the job.
They had a sixteen-hundred-square-foot house with a four-hundred-square-foot lawn in a ten-square-mile linear section of town. Two of their neighbors were retired. The house next door was a rental. She’d had a rainbow sprinkler on a hose in the front yard with patchy wet ground and clumps of crab grass, a JCPenney wedding ring, and a belly newly rounding with their growing child.
It was all impeccably, comfortably, and numbingly safe.
Just what Elle wanted.
Elle drove into the hangar, pulled the key, and set the e-brake. “We’re here, baby.” The space seemed inordinately large for the MG.
Maddie looked up through the windshield and grinned. “There’s the twin otters.”
Elle pulled their suitcases from the trunk. “There she is. All ready for us.”
Wind rattled the corrugated metal walls. Oversized steel-dome light fixtures buzzed, suspended from steel beams that arched overhead.
Madison shuffled her tennis shoes along the floor, squeaking like a basketball player.
“Maddie, please don’t.”
“Sorry.”
“Here, take your backpack and blanket.”
“Do I get to ride in the front seat?”
“Yes. Well, in the cockpit, at least. I’ll strap you into the seat behind mine. You’ll be my navigator.”
“What’s a navigator?”
“The girl in charge of where the plane goes.”
“But that’s your job.”
“Well, yes. But you can help me with the map so we know just how to fly down to California to pick up the boys.”
———
Elle hung her headset over the hula girl glued atop the instrument panel.
Silas Kent.
Unbelievable.
How many years had it been? Why did she not know he’d been stationed in northern California?
He still looked more like a surfer than a fireman.
Streaked raindrops from the afternoon’s thunder cell stained the plane’s narrow windshields. The circle of smokejumpers he stood with on the tarmac joked and laughed.
Yep.
Take away the soot streaks from his face and that cinder-shaded yellow Nomex shirt, and he was still just a shaggy-haired kid, grinning through ash grit, with that same great expanse of ocean in his eyes.
Elle slipped her aviator glasses on.
Last thing I need is another baby-sitting job.
She scooted out of the captain’s chair, wincing as ponytail hairs hung up in the headrest. She followed the strands down with her fingers and broke them at the source, a ring of prior casualties already wrapped around the thin chrome support.
Elle tapped the bulkhead and ducked through to the passenger compartment, the smell of oil and woodsmoke mixing with the humid breeze that wafted in as she opened the side door and lowered the steps. Madison was caught up with her dolly imagining.
“Maddie, you want to come down and say hi? We’ll be here only a few minutes before leaving for your appointment.”
Madison seat-belted her doll into one of the jumper seats. “No thanks, Mom. I need to fly Rose to her appointment first.”
Elle felt a welling of sadness and affection for her daughter. She swallowed, thankful her sunglasses were on so Maddie couldn’t see. “Well, that sounds good. Just make
sure not to really flip any of the switches—just pretend.”
“I know, Mommy. I’m not really going to fly her there.”
“Oh, I see. Well, that’s good. Maybe when you’re older—huh, baby?”
“Of course.”
Elle grinned and bit her lip. “Of course.”
She descended the ladder to the tarmac, knowing from the corner of her eye that she’d caught the attention of Silas, the sandy-haired smiler. She set foot on the runway, took a breath, and steeled herself.
You can’t handle this airship, Surfer Boy.
Laughter broke out again in the circle of smokejumpers. Elle noticed Warren Adams and strolled up to him. “Word is I’m supposed to taxi you up and over yonder. That about right, Mr. Adams?”
Warren grinned with his square, silver-stubbled jaw. “Westmore, what’re you doin’?”
Elle brought her palms up at her sides. “Ain’t it obvious by now? What about you all?”
He hugged her, heavy with the humid odor of sweat and soot. “Huey dropped us off about five minutes ago. Saw Jumper 41 circling to land and had a feeling it might be you. How’s your little girl?”
“Wonderful.” Elle pointed to the plane.
“No, no. I meant Madison, not the Twin Otter.”
“So did I. She’s in there right now.”
“No kidding? Taking her to be with you in South Lake?”
“There’s a lot to it, actually. But she did most of the flying down here, so it was a nice break. Got myself a good nap in.”
Warren chuckled.
Elle ran her hand along her braid. “So how was your jump?”
“Good, good. Growing fire this side of the Sierras. Small in comparison to what’s blowing up in the Desolation Wilderness. We were sent in to pull out an injured radio tech.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“He has a pretty gnarly leg fracture and a concussion. But he’s alive. Last I heard he’s awake now and recovering in the hospital ICU.”
Silas cleared his throat.
Warren threw a sideways glance. “Where are my manners? Elle, this here’s Silas Kent. A man instrumental in the rescue. I’ve been trying to groom him for the next spotter promotion, but some things take easier than others.” He winked at Silas.
She extended a hand, all business. “Good to see you again, Kent.”
Warren raised his eyebrows. “You two already know each other?”
Silas wrapped his coarse fingers around hers, looked in her eyes, and smiled. “We flew together for a while. But it’s been years.”
On the far end of the circle, a slouching jumper spat on the tarmac.
Elle took advantage of the distraction and pulled her hand back. “Hey now, McJumper. You going to clean that up off my runway?”
A Hispanic man beside Silas laughed to himself. “She said Mic-Jumper.”
Warren scratched his jaw. “Been here five minutes and it’s already her runway.”
She pointed a finger at Warren. “You better believe it.”
The spitter straightened, teeth littered with tobacco. “If cleaning that up means I get to fly with you, pretty lady, then absolutely.”
Thunder rolled overhead. Rain spat on the tarmac in dime-sized circles.
“All right, boys,” Warren said. “ ’Nuff of that. Go get showered and fed, and I’ll find out if we get the privilege of flying somewhere soon with Captain Westmore here, as we will respectfully address her from this point on.”
The crew shuffled off.
Warren patted Elle on the shoulder and started toward the base. “Good to see you again.” He threw a glance at Silas. “You coming?”
Silas hesitated, and Warren put up a hand. “Never mind. Don’t know why I asked.”
“Mommy, can I come down now?” Madison stood in the passenger compartment doorway.
Elle turned. “Not now, baby, we’re just going to get fuel and then get right back in the air for your appointment.”
She faced Silas and smiled. Mr. Kent, meet my daughter.
Silas stood there, a look on his face like he’d seen a host of angels.
Elle breathed out a laugh. “Are you all right?”
He glanced at her, back at the plane, and ran a hand through his hair. “That’s your daughter.”
Elle bit her lower lip and nodded. “Yeah.”
His eyes fell to her left hand.
She shifted her weight. Let him wonder—he deserves it.
Returning his attention to her little girl, he whispered, “She’s beautiful.”
She wiped a raindrop from her forehead. “Thank you.”
“Four?”
“Five.”
His eyebrows rose. She could see him doing the math in his head.
Yes, Surfer Boy, I got married and pregnant less than six months after you left.
He looked at the ground and blew out a breath. Smiling, teeth white against his ruddy cheeks, he flipped up a pocket flap on his brush shirt. “You know, I actually have something for you.”
That she didn’t expect. Her voice laced with cynicism. “You brought me something. That’s a good one. It’s been, what, seven years? You didn’t even know you’d see me here.”
She spotted the fuel truck coming down the tarmac. Oh, the things she wanted to say to him. She thought of half a dozen beginnings, certain that all of them would devolve into an argument. Okay. She’d humor him. “So, what is it?”
From his shirt pocket Silas produced green sprigs, slightly charred at the tips. “Found this on the hike to the helicopter landing zone.” He plucked a leaf, tossed it into his mouth, and handed her the rest.
Elle looked from him to the leaves. She held them to her nose and breathed in. She closed her eyes and smiled. Mint. That summer at the beach . . .
Wait.
How’d he do that? What was the matter with her anyway?
She plucked a couple leaves and handed the bouquet back. “Wild mint.” She turned and started walking back to the plane. “Thank you.” She popped a leaf into her mouth and stuck the other in her pocket.
He trotted up next to her. “It wasn’t like I just pocketed it for myself. I’m not lying when I say this—you were the first person I thought of.”
Elle raised and lowered her eyebrows. This wasn’t going to go anywhere. She turned to the horizon. “Another cold front’s coming in.”
“It’s good to see you again, Elle.”
She pasted on a smile. Be strong. “It is good to see you. . . . And Warren too.”
“Oh. Me and Warren.”
“Yes.”
“I heard you mention an appointment. . . . Is your girl sick?”
Maddie was off limits. “She . . . no. She has a condition, and they’re letting me take her to a specialist in Oakland.” The sky turned cobalt and cauliflower. Virga pulled like cotton from boomers in the distance.
He nodded, not taking his eyes off her. She saw in his face something sad, something more . . . grown-up.
His next words surprised her.
“You think that, maybe, you might want some company down to Oakland?”
She froze, dumbfounded, then snapped her jaw shut. She swallowed. There had to be a hundred reasons why this wasn’t a good idea. Wind blew hair strands across her eyes. She studied him. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. “Okay.”
He smiled and shouldered his fireline pack. “Okay if I bring this along?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “That’d be fine.” She eyed him head to toe. “You’re a mess. You sure you don’t want to—” She nodded toward the airbase, insinuating he should take a shower.
He opened his mouth and glanced back. She could tell he was considering whether she’d leave without him.
That she would leave him . . .
She smiled at the subtle turning of the tables. She had said he could come along. She wasn’t going to furtively slip away. “Go ahead. It’ll take me at least fifteen minutes to get the plane refueled and ready to go.”
CHAPTER
08
Silas peeled off his navy blue T-shirt and tossed it on the locker room bench. What was he thinking? He was so impulsive. Asking to fly along with Elle on a whim after walking out on her seven years earlier. Real classy.
Still, was it wrong to want to fly with her? Did he make a bad decision? All he knew was that the moment he saw her, emotions and memories he thought well guarded flooded his mind and heart. Her presence felt like salve for a yearning years suppressed and too often ignored.
A thick cloud of soap-scented steam billowed from the showers. He kicked off his pants and dropped them onto his sweat-and-smoke-saturated clothing pile. His cell phone vibrated on the wooden bench top. Ignoring it, he wrapped a coarse white towel around his waist. The phone vibrated again, working its way toward a precipitous drop onto the tile floor. Warren’s number flashed across the screen. Silas stretched his neck and stared into the fog overhead.
Had it been anyone else . . .
The phone buzzed and toppled. Silas snatched it in the air. “ ’Sup, Warren?”
“Long time no talk. Catch you in the middle of anything?”
“Almost.”
“Just got a call from the Desolation Complex Incident Command. The IC wants us on the tarmac in South Lake by sundown.”
Silas angled his jaw and exhaled. “All right. When are we heading out?”
“Early evening. Captain Westmore has orders to make a quick flight into Oakland. When she returns, we’ll load up and make haste.”
“About that flight to Oakland. You have any objections to my joining her?”
The line stayed silent for several seconds. “I don’t see why not. Just make sure you’ve got your stuff packed for a long stay in South Lake.”
“I will. Thanks. So the IC didn’t say anything else?”
“Nothing, though I get the feeling the whole thing is blowing up. I’ll let you know as I hear more.”
